Will we soon drink water from the North Sea? If it is up to Brabant Water, that would be possible within the foreseeable future. The drinking water company starts a test to produce drinking water from salt water. When everything goes according to plan, Brabanders will soon be the first in Northwestern Europe to drink water from the sea on a large scale.
“No worries, because you don’t taste it. It just tastes nice to the fantastic drinking water that we are used to,” reassures director Rob van Dongen of Brabant Water.
The freshwater stock in the Netherlands is under pressure while the need for sufficient and reliable drinking water is increasing in the coming decades. To prevent water from coming out of the tap, Water Zeewater is a serious alternative, according to Brabant Water Zeewater.
“With this new way we want to prevent scarcity from arising.”
“We now use groundwater for the production of drinking water. In West Brabant in particular, we run into the limits of what we can pump up to the province. With this new way we want to prevent a scarcity,” says Van Dongen.
The salty water is made sweet by so -called reverse osmosis. Seawater is pressed under high pressure by an ultrafine filter membrane. The filter only lets the water through while the salt remains.
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This method has been used for a long time in, for example, Australia and countries in the Middle East. A disadvantage is that the process costs relatively much electricity. “Fortunately, we see that the refinement of the technology requires less and less energy. Moreover, energy companies indicate that the delivery problems were completely resolved around 2030,” says Rob van Dongen.
“A seawater factory is and remains more expensive than a groundwater factory.”
At the same time, according to the director, it is ‘inevitable’ that the price of the drinking water in the new production method will ‘rise something’ in the future. “A seawater factory is and remains more expensive than a groundwater factory.”
The drinking water company will extensively test the production of drinking water from salt water in the coming years. For this, water from the Oosterschelde is pumped into a new location to be built in Tholen in Zeeland, just across the border with Brabant. The intention is that the drinking water can be produced on a large scale in 2031.
To put the project in the spotlight, from the official start on Thursday, five employees of Brabant Water turn a relay walk. Under the motto ‘Water van Zee’ they walk for a week with the seawater from Tholen to Den Bosch.
